Google is open to collaborating with other Indian payments firms to ensure better services for Indian consumers, says Caesar Sengupta, the Vice-President of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative. Photo: Reuters

Google teams up with Indian banks for online consumer loans

Google has teamed up with some Indian banks in an initiative that would facilitate instant, pre-approved consumer loans online within the Google Pay app.

The US tech giant last year launched payments app Tez, meaning fast in Hindi, in India, integrating it with the state-backed unified payments interface as it sought to gain a foothold in the digital payments market in the country.

On Tuesday, Google rebranded the app as Google Pay and said it is partnering with four Indian banks — Federal Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank — to provide instant loans to the app’s users, Reuters reports.

At an annual Google event in New Delhi, Caesar Sengupta, the Vice-President of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, said the move will make banking services accessible to tens of millions of Indians.

“We’re talking to a lot of banks, we’re completely open with who we work with in terms of banking partners,” Sengupta told Reuters on the sidelines of the ‘Google for India’ event.

“Banks bring their financial capabilities, their understanding of the user, their customers. We bring our user experience, our ability to make complex processes extremely simple and very fast,” he said.

Google’s ambitions in the Indian digital payments space could potentially pose a challenge for homegrown Paytm, which is backed by Japan’s SoftBank and China’s Alibaba, the report noted.

Google is open to collaborating with other Indian payments firms, Sengupta said.

“We are huge of fans interoperability … when a product like Tez does well it creates more value in the network for everyone,” he said.

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